Where are the human shields when they are needed most?
Topic: Politics
A new contributor is writing for Gutshot. His name is Roger and you can read his poker wisdom here:

http://www.gutshot.co.uk/authors/roger-kirkham

A few days ago I noticed that Roger has his own blog and decided to check it out. Like me, Roger mixes poker observations with political comment. That may be where the similarities end, as his views on politics seem pretty different to mine. I was particularly enraged by his piece on March 16th about Rachel Corrie. Most of you won't know who she is, so I shall have to explain. It's difficult to do this impartially, as the facts of her death are disputed, but the essence is that Corrie was a young American who went to the Israel/Palestine area to protest against the Israeli demolition policy and was killed by a bulldozer.

According to her supporters, she was protesting against the demolition of a house. According to her critics, she was trying to prevent the demolition of a tunnel that was used to smuggle arms into Israel. In the course of doing one of the above she was killed. Whether her death was an accident or murder is also disputed. She tried to prevent the demolition by lying down in the path of the bulldozer that killed her.

I have told Roger that I'm inclined to agree with Corrie's critics on the facts concerning her death, because I've heard so many lies from anti-Israel fanatics that I'm no longer prepared to take their claims at face value. They know the power of appearing to be the victim. They know that claiming martyr status can prevent rational examination of a cause and they exploit the widespread and normally admirable support for the underdog that is prevalent in Western societies. In short, they are expert manipulators. I should know, because I fell for some of their claims hook, line and sinker before I started spending so much time reading deeper about the subject.

Some examples should suffice:

1) The so-called 'Jenin massacre' of 2002 when claims were made that the Israelis had killed thousands of innocent civilians. Later it was claimed that hundreds had died. The final figure was 56 - most of them armed combatants, not civilians. In the meantime, western newspapers were duped into reporting huge death figures.

2) The "death" of Mohammed Al Dura. This one made my blood boil when it happened in 2000. However, nobody in the mainstream press has ever since brought it to my attention that it was completely faked. One reason I'm grateful for the creation of the internet is that it facilities the exposure of lies like this one.

3) Fake Palestinian funerals. Click the link to see a dead body fall off a stretcher, dust himself down and climb back on again! A pathetic attempt to inflate the death figures at Jenin and to solicit sympathy for the cause.

Leaving aside exactly what happened to Corrie on that day two years ago, there is something that has always irritated me about people like Corrie and it's only lately that I've been able to articulate what it is. It's that her whole protest strategy is predicated on the moral superiority of the people she's attacking. Corrie lay down in the path of a bulldozer in the belief that if the bulldozer driver saw her, he would do the 'decent' thing and spare her life by stopping it. Never mind that doing this could extend the use of an alleged arms smuggling tunnel and lead to deaths of countless Israeli civilians. She expected her life would be treated as more important than theirs. After all, she was a middle-class white American. Of course she's more important than some Israeli bus passengers!

Now try to imagine this working the other way around. Imagine that she wanted to spare the lives of innocent Israelis and stood in front of Hamas rocket launchers or rode around Jerusalem on public transport wearing a bright orange jacket marked 'Human Shield'. It doesn't work, does it? Because those who kill Israeli civilians are utterly depraved, while those fighting back against Palestinian extremists are expected to observe a higher standard of behaviour.

All this reminds me of the human shields who made fools of themselves going to Baghdad before the 2003 war against Iraq. They went there with the intention of protecting hospitals and orphanages and were surprised to learn that the Iraqi goverment wanted them to go to military targets. The Iraqis understood better than the shields that the US would try to minimise civilian deaths and would focus on military targets. They knew that the hospitals already had 'human shields': the patients. Where were these people when they were needed in Israel during the peak years of the intifada depravity? Nowhere near the bloody streets of Tel Aviv, that's for sure. They may be stupid but they're not crazy.

Corrie was young when she died and I wish she had lived longer to see the foolishness of her ways and the contradictions in her position. She no doubt thought of herself as fighting 'fascists' as many critics of Israel do, but she failed to realise that she was making common cause with people whose behaviour is entirely fascistic. Thus it was that a young idealist found herself flying over to the Middle-East to do this:

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=15078&only=yes

Setting fire to a mock US flag in front of a crowd of young children. What kind of person does that? I find it hard to be kind here. This picture perfectly embodies the contradiction of the modern anti-Israel protest movement - that strange mixture of supposedly anti-fascist westerners and Islamic fundamentalists that my friend Allan Engel calls the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of the 21st century.

The Hendon Mob ... and the unsung heroes. Part one.
Topic: Poker
I may have been a "bit harsh" on the Hendon Mob in some of my earlier postings. Not through what I said, so much as what I did not say. To explain properly, let me recap.

I stopped posting on the Hendon Mob in mid-November. I thought I was burning up too much mental energy on it for my own good and I was getting rather sick of some of the abuse that I and other frequent posters were receiving. Around this time I read a comment from Big Dave D on a blog that said I was partly responsible for making the forum worse and thought that both I and the forum might benefit from a period of silence on my part. Three weeks later, I mentioned to Derek at Gutshot that I had stopped posting on forums (I had virtually stopped posting on Gutshot too) and he mentioned that he and others had been thinking of getting me to write for the site. A deal was struck.

A month or two later, I mentioned on Andy Ward's site that having left the HM forum alone, I didn't feel that it had got any better. I wanted to refute the idea that I was to blame for what Big Dave saw as its demise. Within an hour of writing this, someone posted on the HM site a message titled 'David Young calls the mob cunts' or something similar. Funnily enough, it was exactly this kind of rubbish that caused me to stop posting in the first place.

More comment was made on this site to the effect that I was jealous (who wouldn't be jealous of anyone getting $250k of tournament entries per annum?) and someone said that the Mob had done more than most for British poker. At this point, I may have thrown the baby out with the bath water. I am so sick of reading praise for name tournament players that I overlooked some of the positives. The reason is that the things I admire about the Mob are not the things that others admire. Let me explain.

What many people admire about the boys is that they have carved out a big sponsorship deal, won many tournaments overseas and generated lots of publicity. Of these, I would say that only the latter is of any use to other people. Getting a big sponsorship deal doesn't benefit the broad mass of the poker playing population. I have heard it argued that their deal made it easier for others to get sponsored. Even if this is true, I still don't think it's of benefit to the broader poker public. Interesting, Keith 'the camel' Hawkins said something to the same effect on the Hendon Mob site. His precise words were:

"Taking on sponsored players and rich amateurs in big tournaments over a long period of time is finacially unadvisable. For sure, take the odd shot or try and qualify for a big tournament in a super satellite. But there are so many big events these days you can drain a fortune trying to beat players with bottomless pockets."

There is another debate to be held another time about whether it harms you to be playing against people who are not under the stress of committing their own money. I can see both sides of this one. So I shall leave it to one side.

So what do I admire about the Mob? Firstly, they built a forum that enabled me to get to know people like Pete Birks and countless others. Secondly, their site has a beginners' guide and a database that allows you to get to know a bit about your opponensts and lastly, they have always conducted themselves to the highest professional standards and given poker and British poker players in particular, an excellent image. For that we must all be grateful.

I am delighted to see that the Mob have reacted to the nastiness that was infecting the forum. It's a shame that it's necessary to change to a member's only format, but I do believe that the flamers were killing the site. Only a few weeks ago, a friend of mine named Simon Galloway advised players to book their flights to Vegas in advance for the WSOP and pointed out some good value deals that could be booked on Virgin. The first response he got said 'Fuck off, you spamming cunt'. To anyone with half a brain-cell, it's clear that his message wasn't spam. But that didn't hold back the sort of revolting petty-minded attack that has deterred not just me, but countless others from posting again.

I just wish that the Mob had done something about it sooner. The fact that they didn't is one reason that I felt so annoyed about the whole affair. The impression gained, by me at least, was that they didn't notice because they didn't read the forum. It has long amazed me that Ross and Ram never write on the site. I would love to hear the story of how the former won a hi-lo omaha comp at the Vic a couple of years ago and I would like to hear about the latter's ?100,000 heads-up matches in a hotel room in Monte Carlo, which was witnessed by 50 spectators, if my sources are correct.

It utterly baffles me that they choose not to share this with their readers. Ross doesn't even tell us when he's going to be on TV! I find that bizarre. As someone who wrote a lot on the site for no reward and got a ton of abuse in return, it hurts to see the owners of the site on which you write do nothing with it. Perhaps you'll see why I found it so annoying.

In a subsequent post, I want to talk about some of the unsung heroes of the UK poker scene.

The Poker Channel, coming soon.
Topic: Poker
The Poker Channel launches on Wednesday. As I wrote on Gutshot, I am a panellist on three out of seven episodes of 'Bar Beat'. Episode one will be shown on Wednesday. If the shows are shown in the order in which they were filmed then I won't be in it. However there is no guarantee that this will be the case. Whichever one they show, it's sure to be interesting. Enjoy!

See the schedule here!

Is ignorance bliss?
Topic: Misc.
From time to time I torment myself by reading the views of the great British public on the BBC's 'Have your say' page. You can often find people talking total nonsense about the great issues of the day. Some of the greatest drivel comes from people in the church, as they are often utterly divorced from reality.

The latest topic is the issue of whether sex education should be compulsory in schools. It would be awful to find nobody prepared to talk drivel on this of all topics. Luckily, the Reverend JW Hughes of Somerset comes through for us with a classic. The italics are mine.

"Sex is not the be all and end all of life that media and politician types think. It is fundamentally proven that the ceaseless sexualisation of life that we see is a disaster. School should be a place where sex is never mentioned, taught, or thought about. Give the kids a place where sex is not forced down their throats the whole time."

I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did! Do 'politician types', whatever they are, really think that sex is the be all and end all of life? Is it possible to imagine a school full of normal kids where sex is never 'thought about'? And don't get me started on the last sentence. Is this man for real? I do hope so.

The odd thing about Pokerstars.
Topic: Poker
There is something that always surprises me about Pokerstars. Despite its reputation as the best site for multi-table tournaments, it doesn't correctly handle the dead-blind/dead-button situation in them. Instead it moves the blinds forward, just as would happen in a cash game if someone got up. The curious result is that a player can be spared the need to post a blind if someone gets knocked out in front of them. This can be a life-saver for a small stack in the late stages.

Not only am I surprised that it doesn't get this right, I'm also astonished that I've never seen anyone point this out before. One site that handles this correctly is Victor Chandler, which is the object of a great deal of abuse. Funny old world!

A Lionel Hutz moment.
Topic: Misc.
I reached the end of a stick of deodorant today. Nothing remarkable about that, except that it's called 'Unlimited' (by Lynx). I can't help thinking that the Trades Description Act ought to be brought to bear on the manufacturers. I'm reminded of Lionel Hutz, the solicitor in The Simpsons, who takes out a law suit against the film 'The Never Ending Story'.

Evidence
Topic: Misc.
I've grown very fond of the television show 'CSI' recently and make a point of watching it on Tuesday nights, both the Vegas and Miami editions. For those who aren't familiar with the programme, it concerns the working lives of Crime Scene Investigators, usually referred to as 'Forensics' in British police drama.

It's certainly impressive what forensic science can do nowadays, especially when people are caught for crimes committed decades ago, due to progress in the use of DNA. Some have suggested to me that my opposition to the death penalty, which is solely based on concern about killing the wrong person, should therefore be dropped. The argument goes that advances in our understanding of science make it hard to happen now. Think of all the times a jury has been told that the DNA found at the scene had a 'million to one' chance of being from someone other than the defendent.

While it's reassuring on one level, it still disturbs me when the public are led to believe that evidence like that is infallible. I know that people can lie and cheat for an easy life and I worry about how easy it would be for a crooked or overpressed policeman to plant such evidence or interfere with it in the lab.

Even without deliberate tampering, problems exist. I said before that I thought Sion Jenkins was probably the victim of a miscarriage of justice and since then he's been released and will have a new trial. We have also seen women have convictions for infanticide overturned. The science that was used to convict them was later shown to be doubtful. Today's breakthrough discoveries can be tomorrow's 'Junk Science'. Cold Fusion anyone?

Will nobody stand up for New Labour?
Topic: Politics
It's been over 24 hours since I posted my view that 'New Labour' had achieved little in its eight years in office. Given that it's won two elections by substantial majorities and is expected by everyone to win the next one too, there ought to be someone out there who will defend it. Yet despite that, I have not received one message defending the current government!

Thatcher was reviled by many, but she had her passionate supporters too. How can a party be so far ahead in the polls and yet inspire nobody?

What has New Labour achieved?
Topic: Politics
The phony election is hotting up. Party political posters have already appeared, despite the lack of any formal announcement. I've been fascinated to see that the Labour Party's posters are so negative. I'm not against negative advertising, but in Labour's case, I would have thought that after close to eight years in government they would have more to say for themselves than just reminding people what interest rates were like under the Tories thirteen years ago or what unemployment was under Thatcher.

All of which prompts the question of what the party has actually accomplished. As you know, I very much support what Blair has done with respect to Iraq and believe that it will reap huge benefits for decades to come. But what about domestically? Have any of the public services improved? Do you believe the crime or hospital waiting list statistics any more? You might think that the economy has done well for you, but are you aware that your pension savings, if you have any, are being raided like never before and that you may not be able to retire as early as your parents did?

For my money, Labour did one FANTASTIC thing for this country and did it on day one when it made the Bank of England independent. Not doing so was the Tories' biggest ever mistake. With central bank independence comes greater confidence in sterling and therefore interest rates can be kept low. If the Tories had done this, they might still be in office now.

But otherwise, it seems to me that Labour's great accomplishment is to create a party that occupies a central position on the British landscape, funded by stealth taxation that many people, especially the young, don't understand. It has wasted taxpayers money on greatly expanding the state, with little discernable benefit.

I am interested to know what readers think.

About the Comments Section
Topic: Misc.
I've noticed a few people on the Gutshot and Hendon Mob forums claim that I've deleted posts that they have written in the comments section of this blog. I would like to make clear that while I reserve the right to delete comments, in practice I have only ever done so for two reasons. One is obscenity - which happened on the first day that I enabled comments. The other is for duplication, when someone has unintentionally entered the same comment twice (see below).

Note that posting a comment is a two-stage process. After typing it in and posting it (press 'continue'), you will be given a preview of how it will look. But this is only a preview and if you leave at this point, your message will be lost. You must press 'post comment' for it to be lodged. This takes time and some people press it a second time and thus duplicate their post, because nothing seems to be happening. Please be patient.

It is possible that sofware problems have caused posts to fail to appear in the past, but I strongly suspect that most people who think I've deleted something didn't realise that they had to press 'post comment' after seeing the preview. I have never deleted something just because I didn't agree with it.

The pros and cons of going to Vegas:
Topic: Misc.

America gets it.
Topic: Politics
The US is to start a European-based Arabic language television station. The idea is to combat the one-sided anti-American bias of existing Arabic language stations like Al Jazeera.

From the source article:

"Obviously some of the people who are discontented and are recruitable for terrorism are Muslim minorities in Europe," said Harvard professor Joseph Nye, a noted soft-power advocate and former chairman of the National Intelligence Council -- the federal government's strategic intelligence think tank. "The idea of appealing to these people to try to attract them away from an oversimplified view of America-as-villain seems to make sense," he added.

It's a great idea. And it's also a good indication that the US understands Europe's future far better than Europe itself does.

Me and the Hendon Mob.
Topic: Poker
Over at Andy Ward's Diary, I spotted a sideways comment about me from Big Dave D, regarding the fact that I post less about poker on this site since I started writing for Gutshot. David wrote this message to Andy:

You're fetish with Samuels is a bit of a leak...as is your continued posting on THM. I'm sure now that you are fully "pimp my ride" with a panoply of poker sites, all posts will strictly be Pay per View. And maybe, like DY, u can stop on that funny poker stuff.

Andy said he was going to stop writing on the Hendon Mob forum, but hasn't stuck to it. I said the same, but have stuck to it. It's been 14 weeks now. Amazingly I'm still second in the all time posting list after over three months of silence. Shortly before I stopped posting on there, there was a discussion on another blog somewhere in which either Dave or 'chaos' suggested that I was partly to blame for the deterioration in the quality of the forum, because of my many posts about politics. In my defence, while agreeing that I did write a lot about politics, I should stress that many of the actual threads in which I did so were actually started by other people. These threads were also very popular with many people and came at a time when the US, and indeed the world, stood at a crossroads, because of the November election.

So on Andy's site I wrote this:

"A few months ago, there was some talk on Big Dave D's blog to the effect that I was partly responsible for ruining the Hendon Mob forum by getting involved in lots of discussions about politics.

Shortly afterwards I grew disillusioned with the forum and stopped posting on it on the 17th of November. Since then, does anyone think it's gotten better? I don't. I now find it amazingly boring and look at it about one fifth as much as I used to.

The problem wasn't the offtopic discussion, I don't believe, as much as the endless abuse dished out from total nobodies at anyone who presented a view. Combined with adoration of people who never contributed anything to the forum (Devilfish, Surinder and half of the Hendon Mob themselves), I began to wonder why I bothered. The more you write, the more people think they have the right to insult you. The move was obvious. Do nothing unless someone pays you.

Why Pete Birks continues to give away free content I don't know. He's one of the only worthwhile posters there left. Save it for Stan James, Pete! The fact is that the forum exists to promote the site and the site exists to renew the Mob's amazing deal with Prima. You are basically working for free to get Ross and Ram into comps. And they don't even send you a thankyou note!

Such is the power of fame."

It only took a few hours for someone, under an alias, to write a post titled 'David Young calls the mob cun*s'. I don't recall using those words or any remotely similar, but the poster did at least provide a link to what I did say, so people can see for themselves that I didn't. He also added the short message 'Burn him'. It is very possible that this person has written this ironically, especially after Andy's excellent post on groupthink, which pointed out this exact phenomenon in poker. The next poster to the thread didn't make clear whether he actually bothered to read my original words and said:

"Everybody is entitled to their own views and opinions but I have to say that I think the HM have done more for British poker than most. Along with Devilfish and Dave Colclough (+ a few), these are the recognised faces of our UK game and they promote it in a very positive light. I think the biggest issue is they are at the top of thier "field" and as such, people seem to take fun in trying to run them down.

My guess is they are big enough to take it. I was lucky enough to spend a fair amount of time with them at the Bellagio in December and each and everyone of them were great. Happy to talk, help and be all round good guys. My hat is off to them.
They were and still are, where most of us aspire to be."

Take fun in trying to run them down? How does he draw that conclusion? I'm also interested to know how Devilfish, Colclough and the Mob have "done more for British poker than most". Genuinely baffled in some ways. The Mob's greatest contribution by far, in my opinion, is the forum. It was fantastic a few years ago, but now seems populated with people who want to moan about online poker being rigged when their aces get cracked and er... er ... well I'm not sure, as much of it is so unmemorable now.

Is it so nasty to point out that the site was (I guess) built from the outset with the intention of getting a sponsorship deal? It seems fairly obvious to me. Now that the deal exists, it continues in order to get that deal renewed. Surely that's a statement of the obvious?

Meanwhile, what is Devilfish's contribution to British poker? I know that he's made British players seem more of a threat to the Americans and I'm not even sure that I'm grateful for that. But has he built a bricks and mortar cardroom, like Barry and Derek did with Gutshot? Has he negotiated a rake rebate for online players, like some others I could name? No! He hasn't even told Ultimatebet to get a sterling bank account, like I told Phil Hellmuth it should do. Nor, when I last looked, did UB seem to have taken the British market into account in scheduling its tournaments, with all the decent sized ones starting at 2am, to suit the Americans. Things may have changed, but I wouldn't know, as I gave up waiting for UB to be more British-friendly about a year ago and haven't looked at it since. It's not even downloaded on my new computer.

One person who has made a difference to poker in Britain and much of the rest of Europe, is the much maligned Nic Szerameta. Few realise that he's the one who came up with the format for Late Night Poker, which is what lead to the massive growth in the game. Nor that he's one of the founders of the World Heads Up championship, a real innovation that the Americans never thought of. And he was also involved in getting Europe's best structured tournament going - the E-WSOP, which for years ran with a two hour round structure!

But he gets abuse while Devilfish and Colclough get praise. Why? Well it doesn't help that Nic spends so little time in London or the South East meaning that many people never get to know him. But the real thing that gets you praised is winning a high profile tournament. When Surinder Sunar won the WPT event in Paris last year, I was stunned by the number of people who wrote in to praise him on the Hendon Mob forum, as though Surinder ever looked at it. Of course he didn't. He never even replied. My guess is that he's never looked at the site and never even found out that people were praising him on it.

Don't get me wrong. I like the Hendon Mob. I've been to two of them's houses. I like Surinder, Devilfish and Colcough. I've spoken on friendly terms with all of them. But I'm not going to credit them with doing much for the British game. That credit should go to others, many of whom you've never heard of.

In the meantime, if you think I'm being so hard on Ross and Ram, can you find anything that they have written on the forum in the last three months (Diary pieces don't count). And have any of them thanked Pete Birks for his many fantastic contributions, which stand head and shoulders above the general dross?

Has the worm finally turned in Germany?
Topic: Politics
It was bound to happen eventually, but I didn't think it would be this soon. A German magazine has published an article that considers the possibility that Bush is right about the middle east and that Europe is wrong. Before you say 'So what?', I should explain that the German media has been the most anti-Bush biased that I have ever seen - far worse than the Guardian, Independent, New York Times etc. In fact a whole blog has been devoted to exposing this bias:

http://medienkritik.typepad.com/

So it was refereshing to see this in Der Spiegel:

'Could George W. Bush Be Right?' (English Translation)

The article notes that Reagan's demand for the Berlin Wall to be torn down was considered far fetched in 1987 and he drew scorn from the German media then for being "inopportune, utopian and crazy". Yet he was proved right within three years.

The article notes: "Europeans today -- just like the Europeans of 1987 -- cannot imagine that the world might change. Maybe we don't want the world to change, because change can, of course, be dangerous. But in a country of immigrants like the United States, one actually pushes for change. In Mainz today, the stagnant Europeans came face to face with the dynamic Americans. We Europeans always want to have the world from yesterday, whereas the Americans strive for the world of tomorrow."

That's revolutionary talk coming from a German print magazine!

Appeasement be upon him.
Topic: Religion
Am I the only person shocked by this?

Oxford Cambridge and RSA Examinations policy statement

It states:

"OCR will always put 'peace be upon him' after Muhammad in the form of an Arabic colophon as a mark of respect. However we do not expect candidates to do this. A reference to this can be found on page 13 of the OCR GCSE Religious Studies Notes for Guidance.

Why is a UK examination board paying respect to Muhammad? Where is the objectivity in this?